Party Politics - The early cold war

To be sure, Americans have on occasion set partisan and personal political
concerns aside in foreign policy, in line with the sentiment of Stephen
Decatur's toast. This has been the pattern in the early stages of
the nation's wars. But such consensus on international matters has
often been short-lived, more so than is generally acknowledged. It is
often assumed, for example, that the period surrounding the onset of the
Cold War—from the end of World War II to the start of
1950—was a bipartisan period in U.S. foreign policy. A close
examination of these years suggests otherwise. There was a period of
strong bipartisanship on foreign policy decisions in Washington from the
passage of the aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947 through the middle of
1949, but it was not there before that time or after.

In late 1945, with the popular Franklin D. Roosevelt dead and World War II
over, Republicans in Congress saw a chance to gain control on Capitol Hill
in the 1946 elections and to take the presidency two years later. On
domestic issues they could run against the federal government and against
trade unions, especially the open influence of the American Communist
Party in those unions. On foreign policy issues the GOP could denounce
Truman's "weakness" in dealing with the Soviet
Union—that is, unless the administration preempted this line of
attack by standing up forcefully to Moscow.

Domestically, Truman could do relatively little to deflect the Republican
challenge on policy issues. He could, however, be firmer with the
Soviets—a shift urged on him in the fall of 1945 by his White House
chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, and by the two leading senators on
the Foreign Relations Committee, Democrat Tom Connally of Texas and
Republican Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan. Vandenberg, who represented a
state with a large number of Polish Americans unhappy with developments in
their native land, was especially adamant about standing up to the Kremlin
on all fronts.

It is unclear just how much of an effect partisan politics had on
Truman's decision to "stop babying" the Soviets in
early 1946. But he was very much aware of the growing congressional
criticism of Secretary of State James Byrnes's continuing efforts
to make deals with Moscow, and also Congress's aim, now that World
War II was over, to reassert legislative authority of some foreign policy
issues. The evidence is not conclusive, but it appears Truman was
significantly affected by strong pressures from Congress to take a harder
line toward the Soviet Union in the early weeks of 1946. In the election
campaign that autumn, political paranoia and exploitation was much in
evidence. Republican campaigners delighted in asking voters: "Got
enough inflation? … Got enough debt? … Got enough strikes?
… Got enough communism?" Senator Robert Taft, one of the
most distinguished figures on Capitol Hill, accused Truman of seeking a
Congress "dominated by a policy of appeasing the Russians abroad
and fostering communism at home," while in California, a young
House candidate named Richard Nixon denounced his opponent as a
"lip service American" who consistently voted the Moscow
line in Congress and who fronted for "un-American elements."
And indeed, the GOP scored a resounding victory in the election, gaining
control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1928. The day
after the election several of Truman's advisers met and concluded
that the White House would have to take definite steps to put the
Democratic coalition back together if Truman was to have any chance of
winning the 1948 election. One such step: make clear to the American
people that Harry Truman opposed Soviet domination of eastern Europe.

As the 1948 election approached, Truman missed few opportunities to talk
up the Cold War, a strategy urged on him by numerous advisers. Such a
stance, they pointed out, would insulate the president against Republican
charges that he was too soft on Moscow and at the same time undercut Henry
Wallace's bid for the presidency on the Progressive ticket. In
November 1947, White House aide Clark Clifford and former FDR assistant
James Rowe predicted that relations with Moscow would be the key foreign
policy issue in the campaign, that those relations would get worse during
the course of 1948, and that this would strengthen Truman's
domestic political position. "There is considerable political
advantage in the administration in its battle with the Kremlin,"
the two men told the president. "The worse matters get … the
more is there a sense of crisis. In times of crisis, the American citizen
tends to back up his president." In the months that followed, White
House speechwriters talked tough on Soviet-American relations and mocked
Wallace's call for improved relations with the Kremlin, portraying
him as an unwitting dupe of communists at home and abroad.

It was a conscious blurring of domestic and foreign communism, and it
would have important implications for politics in Cold War America. In the
spring of 1947, Truman had created the Federal Employee Loyalty Program,
which gave government security officials authorization to screen two
million employees of the federal government for any hint of political
deviance. It marked the inauguration of an anticommunist crusade within
America's own borders that paralleled the Cold War abroad, a
crusade that contained a large element of practical politics. Opposing
radicals and the Soviet Union was a way of attracting votes and building a
political reputation, or of avoiding being denounced as a fellow traveler.
Meanwhile, any possibility for honest debate and criticism about policy
toward the communist world disappeared, as those on the left who might
have articulated an alternative vision lost cultural and political
approval. For at least a quarter of a century thereafter, campaign attacks
from the left on either Democratic or Republican foreign policies proved
singularly unsuccessful.

Truman went on to win the 1948 election against the expectations of many.
Stunned Republicans immediately began working overtime to exploit the
communist victory in China, allegations of communists within the U.S.
government, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson's support of the
accused spy Alger Hiss as they maneuvered for revenge in the midterm
election two years later. When the Korean War broke out in June 1950,
Truman initially received strong bipartisan support for his decision to
intervene. But he knew the Republican support could evaporate quickly.
When Truman that summer considered a plan to expand the war into North
Korea, he feared that what the historian Melvin Small called "the
prudent but not anticommunist-enough decision" to halt at the
Thirty-Eighth Parallel could hurt the Democrats at the polling booth in
November. Truman authorized General Douglas MacArthur to try to liberate
North Korea and announced his decision at a cabinet meeting where the
major item on the agenda was the election.

MacArthur's gambit caused Chinese forces to intervene from the
North in November 1950, and a military stalemate quickly developed. When
the Truman administration commenced armistice talks in 1951, GOP leaders,
still determined to make foreign policy a central part of their criticism
of the Democrats, immediately went on the attack. Any truce at or near the
Thirty-Eighth Parallel would be an "appeasement peace," they
charged. When the presidential election campaign geared up the following
year, Republican leaders, including nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower, asserted
that Truman had been foolish to agree to negotiations and that he was
compounding the error by continuing them in the face of clear evidence
that the communists were using the time to build up their forces in Korea.
Even the apparent economic health of the nation was turned against the
White House: the prosperity, GOP spokesmen charged, "had at its
foundation the coffins of the Korean war dead," slaughter that as
yet appeared to have no end. The historian Rosemary Foot, in her study of
the Korean armistice talks, showed that this partisan pressure contributed
to the hardening of the administration's bargaining posture in
1952. "Sensitivity to public charges, to congressional attacks, and
to electoral charges that the Democratic administration had been led into
a negotiating trap by its 'cunning' enemies, all reinforced
the administration's preference for standing firm rather than
compromising," Foot concluded. Pleas from the State Department for
a flexible posture, especially on the nettlesome issue of repatriating
prisoners of war, fell on deaf ears.

Attacking an incumbent's policies is a simpler matter than
governing, as the Republicans would soon learn. Upon taking office in
January 1953, Eisenhower faced not merely the task of bringing the Korean
War to an end (a deal was reached in July 1953) but a myriad of other
thorny issues as well. Party politics, it is clear, influenced his
approach to many of them. And it was not just the Democrats Eisenhower had
to think about; he also confronted differing impulses on foreign policy
within his own party. Some socalled old guard Republicans such as Robert
Taft were dubious about the Europe-centered internationalism to which
Eisenhower and his soon-tobe secretary of state, John Foster Dulles,
adhered in the 1952 campaign; many of them wanted a limited American role
in world affairs, rooted in an airpower-oriented Fortress America strategy
and weighted more toward Asia. Eisenhower immediately set upon placating
this old guard on military, Asian, and domestic security matters to gain
its acquiescence in a Europe-first internationalism. He undoubtedly had
the old guard partly in mind when he wrote to his NATO commander, Alfred
Gruenther, in the midst of the Quemoy-Matsu crisis of 1954–1955,
that "at home, we have the truculent and the timid, the jingoists
and the pacifists." On Taiwan, the president continued, he was
considering "what solutions we can get that will best conform to
the long term interests of the country and at the same time
can command a sufficient approval in this country so as to secure the
necessary Congressional action
" (original emphasis).